BTS Group Aktie

All right. I think we'll start. So welcome to this presentation with BTS after the Q2 results. So with us today, we have Jessica Skon, who will do a short presentation, and then we will move on with some Q&A. So please go ahead, Jessica.

Thank you. Dear investors. I hope you're having a nice summer calling in today from San Francisco. I'm pleased to report our Second Quarter results. Basically 1 more quarter of profit growth. So across the group, 9% revenue growth, currency adjusted, 13% profit growth and EBITDA margin improvement from $11.7 million to $12.3 million.

Reasons for that, BTS South America is back to strong profitability. Maybe I'll pause and see if someone can mute the line? Sorry for that interruption. Q2, 1 more quarter of profit growth. Revenue 9% EBITDA, 13% growth, EBITDA margin and improvement from 11.7% to 12.3%.

North America continues to perform. So back to strong profitability again in the second quarter. Europe continues to deliver really strong growth. BTS Other markets still struggling in the second quarter, similar to the first, but we believe is on track to recover. AI continues to drive really fast revenue growth for us, and we feel very differentiated as an AI partner to our clients.

If we double-click into BTS' biggest unit, BTS North America, where we had the turnaround starting in the middle of last year, second strong quarter in a row, back to strong profitability. Revenue is super nice to see the biggest unit go back to double-digit organic revenue growth. Profitability up 60 percentage points, talk to 37.5%.

EBITDA margin, nice improvement from last year, and we still expect that to continue to increase. I can explain more in a bit. And we expect North America to continue to be strong for the second half of the year due to several dimensions. As I mentioned, our ambition is to get back to higher profitability margin levels over the next coming quarters.

And I'll just say 1 thing that happened in the second quarter in North America was we had 1 of our smaller businesses that was unprofitable. We actually shut it down in the second quarter and had about $400,000 of in-quarter severance related to that. Another business we had another big AI diamond level breakthrough that really is revolutionizing the way that the team works across our custom certification and content offerings.

So we also decreased the size of that team. Those costs were hit in the second quarter, and it took out about a little over USD 1 million in run rate costs to be realized over the coming quarters. And then our client demand continues to strengthen in the energy financial services and health care sectors. And we expect continued growth to continue during the second half of the year. So we feel really good about the North America turnaround and continuing to perform.

BTS Europe had an amazing growth in the second quarter, 25% revenue growth with a 38% increase in profit. And with that growth, we see a nice improvement in the EBITDA margin at 16.2%. What's behind the growth well it's big deals that we had won in the past that continue to perform.

Smaller deals that came in actually grew in size bigger than the initial order intake. And BTS Europe in the second quarter saw no project cancellations or delays across the clients. We also see increase in demand from the defense and manufacturing sectors. And all of our offices in Europe, except one, delivered double-digit growth.

And given their fast growth rate in the first half, we expect Europe to continue to grow in the second half, but at a slower clip. BTS other markets was basically flat in the second quarter, a decrease in profit of negative 26%. That's due to the same problems we talked about in the first quarter with some of the really low performing units in BTS Asia and EBITDA margin 12.5%, dropped from 79% Q2 2025.

All of this is due to the continued headwinds in Asia Pacific. We took those -- we addressed those head on in the first quarter. We've shifted different partners in the region, partner-led activities across different countries. We've had a big increase in AI marketing events, which have been perceived very strongly in those countries, which has led to a stronger opportunity pipeline.

We've consolidated some of the offices where we just have less people and we don't need them and some head count adjustments to make sure you have the right team moving forward. All of that said, we expect BTS Other markets to have a strong recovery in the second half of the year.

AI continues to be our friend. It continues to differentiate us, and it's a source of revenue growth for the firm. First, we continue to innovate across the portfolio with AI, and that makes our core services more differentiated and helps our clients experiment within their functions of new tools and services that are available to keep their functions on the leading edge.

Also, we shifted this quarter for services where our clients are hiring us specifically to drive AI adoption, AI workflow reimagination, AI innovation across the firm. We're going to report those out down in terms of revenues rather than bookings. It's just simply a reflection of it's becoming a more significant part of the total revenue of the business.

In the second quarter, it hit 10% of total revenue. and the growth of the revenue associated with helping our clients with their AI implementations grew 221% compared to the same quarter of the year before at SEK 76 million.

Why invest in BTS? We have a history of sustained profitable growth, and we believe we are back to performing in line with those principles. AI is creating more opportunities for us, not less. The whole market seems to be realizing that AI is primarily not a tech issue. It is a people a change and an innovation issue. And with that understanding, it fits with BTS' core capabilities.

And then our growth, as you know, as a business model is capital light. So if we double click into those very quickly in terms of sustained profitable growth, sustained growth is in our DNA at 13% revenue. We had 9% in the second quarter, and I believe we are on track to get back to our historical levels. We're back to growth in our biggest unit, which hit double digit and 60% profit growth in the second quarter.

We have an amazing list of global clients. and our win rates continue to be strong and BTS has a brand in the market as a company who has been innovating how companies learn change and perform for 40 years. And that is what every company in the planet needs right now as they retool every person in the company with AI and -- we invent their rules.

And we only have 1% global market share ahead of the competition. We believe we're in the sweet spot for this AI era given that it's a people change and innovation problem, and it is not -- it doesn't resemble the similarities to digital transformation or ERPs of the past. We continue to realize that we're in the top 5% of companies who have had 3 different major AI breakthrough innovations across our operations, spanning new products and services all the way to the back end and we can take those learnings of what's required to invent with AI and what's required to mandate the new ways of working to our clients.

And we continue to do that with many client events and opportunities and proposals in our pipeline. As I mentioned, it's now 10% of total revenues and growing rapidly. And -- given the IO innovations of the past, I expect we will have many more coming in the future quarters across our functions in particular. We have already realized SEK 74 million in productivity gains related to AI innovation and change implementation.

And all of this, while our core remains in strong demand. Clients are investing in getting actually people together to make sure that they understand the strategy that they know how to act and that they're accelerating the innovation of what they're able to do with AI. They also are using us to scale change at big scale and speed. And then some of the companies right now, the native companies are our clients.

And I'll give you an example of our work with Anthropic. You can see a quote from the Chief Commercial Officer, Paul Smith. We brought BTS in early. They rolled their sleeves up from day 1, modeled every stage of our sales cycle, built the playbooks across market segments, full simulations of how we go to market, incredibly high impact hands-on work. Now they're part of our Anthropic service partner network and our customers get the same.

So we continue to kind of learn at the epicenter of how AI is evolving by helping them with our core services and taking those learnings out to the market. And then finally, as you know, for long-term investors, our growth is capital light. Since our IPO in 2001, we've had 12% revenue CAGR. Roughly 2/3 of that is organic. That has been able to fund 1 to 2 on average acquisitions a year for the last 20 years despite the acquisitive approach to our growth, in addition to organic we typically pay between 40% to 65% of profit after tax through dividend.

And we have done all of that without asking for additional capital from our shareholders. And we continue to have a strong net cash position with our cash conversion rate at 84% over the last 12 months. And as a result of the strong first half and what we can foresee in the second half, we're raising our outlook to be significantly better than 2025.

And with that, I'm happy to answer questions.

Great. Thank you so much, Jessica. I'll start with a couple of questions, just feel free to write the questions in the chat or you could raise your hand if you wish to ask a question to Jessica.

So first of all, obviously, very strong on the top line with improving growth to 9% here. And I just wondered, I mean, looking into H2, when you talk about the outlook statements, both from North America and other markets to improve. So what can you say about bookings? Or is it more that you expect continued momentum to remain.

For North America, we expect the momentum to continue in the second half. And for BTS Other markets, we expect them to get back to growth. So.

All right. Perfect. Then just on the costs in North America specifically, I think that was the the segment or division where the margin didn't really live up to the expectations. You talked a little bit about severance costs, et cetera. I'm not sure if you quantified this exactly, but can you just clarify a little bit what the sort of underlying margin you think was in the quarter do you exclude us?

If I exclude the 2 businesses that we either shut down? Or was that your question? Or just more details on the margin?

Yes. Just if you could add some color on the underlying margin development, if you sort of exclude the more one-off related items. .

Sure. Okay. If I exclude the one-off items. And keep in mind that those 2 businesses that we either canceled or reduced the team because of the innovations we're actually hurting our profit through the first half. So now they will be profit accretive in the second half. The third reason for the lower margin was the Soundinborg acquisition from a year ago for coaching for skilled coaching was basically an unprofitable tech company.

And so by bringing them into the firm, they naturally reduce the margins in North America by a bit, right, compared to the old service model that we had. So that was a strategic decision. If we actually remove those 2 unprofitable businesses in the first half and the Sound inborn, our margin would have been up 4 more percentage points. So that -- I mean, -- my guess is that's probably more what you were expecting and that would explain it. .

Perfect. And that's related to North America margins. .

Only North America, yes, correct. .

We had some questions from Granath at ABG. I think the first 1 we have already answered a little bit -- the second part of it, I think, is interesting. It's about the token cost. So given that you obviously can reduce your head count quite a bit by improving the efficiency with AI. So how is the token costs evolve? And is this a part of margin pressure, et cetera?

Not this year, it will not be a part of margin pressure. Next year, we expect it to increase quite a bit. So I can tell you our more details under our hypotheses there. Our -- so we switched from ChatGPT to Claude suite for the whole company in May of this year. But the deal we struck with Anthropic for the Cloud Suite was a typical total enterprise license for the first 12 months.

We did not shift to a token consumption model, and that gives us time to learn, right, by function and by role, which modes to use and at which levels for the tasks that our team needs. So we have time. We have time for our leaders to learn this and as a company to learn it. And we have some hypotheses in the IT function that we're testing across our teams.

So -- but however, that said, given the what we're learning. We expect our token cost with Anthropic to go up 4x probably next year. For us, that's a magnitude of, let's say, we're spending 400,000 with them this year. We think that it might be USD 1.2 million, USD 1.5 million, USD 1.6 million next year.

Now that is not our total software costs. that's just would be the cost associated with token consumption from cloud, right? And we're doing a really good job of reducing our other software and SaaS cost on a regular clip to try and balance out keeping our total software spend. Maybe it will grow next year a little bit, but it's not going to grow 4x, right?

A percentage of that is going to go up. And then we have more pretty big innovations hitting our operations in the second half of this year. We have a major platform that supports almost all of our work for our clients, and we're launching a new 1 just this month. And it is an absolute breakthrough in efficiencies and productivity and ease for our teams and so forth. And so as the new platform comes online, and the old 1 starts to go into maintenance mode and we let that run out with the existing clients.

The cost savings from that would easily make up for the increase in token costs next year. But the timing of all this will be playing out over the next 4 quarters.

Perfect. And kind of a related question on the efficiency. Another question from Donny here. The number of employees on a group level is down for the fifth consecutive quarter. And any question on when do you expect that to trough -- and also, the second part of it is, if it's sustainable to continue to shrink employees when growth covers almost double digits on an organic basis this quarter.

So first of all, we are increasing the number of billable consultants that we are hiring and the total number of billable consultants is going up. The group of employees that is declining is and has primarily been the operational back-end office functional staff of the company. So that for a while now, you'll probably see that reality play out.

And at the same time, we will continue to hire as we need. But we're just balancing the impact of the AI innovation, specifically on the operational side with growing the little consultants. So my guess -- it's hard because we need both of those things to be true. Probably, we would start to see. Yes, it's hard to say.

I would give us another 4 quarters of this back-end front-end balancing to play out before we would see total net adds unless we make more acquisitions in that time.

Sorry, I think we have a question from John Hilton, if you want to.

Perfect. On the same topic, net reduction of employees, but you also say that you've added a billable consultants. So -- if you just look at the cost impact, is it negative so far because it pays severance for the 1 you lay off and then you add -- you don't get a reduction on the total salary cost because you had on the other hand, so to speak, did you understand what I tried to ask.

I think so. And there's been a couple of waves of these initiatives. So the reductions that we did in last year right now are net positive on the P&L. -- right? And then the ones that we adjusted in the second quarter that are resulting in about USD 1.15 million in annual run rate. Those will only start to be positive in Q3, Q4, Q1, Q2.

But you said you added billable consultants. .

We are adding them. We are now adding them. Like our recruitment pipelines are -- we have open reqs across the system. So we'll only start to see those coming in now in the second half. .

Okay. So overall cost levels, what should we expect really the will they kind of grow with your top line? Or otherwise, I thought you had kind of fixed cost on regular consultants and developers, but then you have pretty variable cost if you have an off-site event, et cetera, where there's just a lot of variable costs. So how should 1 view your ability to scale the margin if you continue to grow.

I mean the -- the biggest factor in growing the margin right now is the continued AI innovations across our back-end operations. Because we still have well over 30% of our total employees in back end operation roles. But yes, in terms of growing billable consultants and number of sellers, those costs would pretty much grow in line with the rep top line growth.

And then final for me here. The impact on pricing given that you can develop a simulation, I think some over a day, which took 2 weeks a while ago. We still build the same you charge for the value you give them, despite you being much quicker to actively develop.

Yes, 2 things have happened. One, we've -- we're still doing price for value, especially for the simulations that are around new strategy creation and strategy execution, and we're doing a lot of working sessions with the clients. but we've also been able to say yes to deals that have a fast turnaround time that we weren't able to say yes to before. And in those deals, okay, maybe it takes us 3 weeks to work but then it's getting deployed for many people.

And so the total deal size is very -- I mean at least the rollout, which is the most profitable part of our project is the same size as before. So we've done a lot more projects with very fast turnaround times, being able to meet our clients' speed expectations.

And then just a final, if that's okay. I mentioned 10% of revenue is now in direct AI-related sales -- it sounds like that's more traditional consulting? Or is this your -- do you use your normal building simulation type of work style with this AI or are you just telling your customers how to use AI.

No, it's a mix. It's a mix of our core capabilities and core simulation services with helping them get hands on keyboard and starting to like work activity activity through their work. So for example, there's plenty of companies who want to introduce new AI tools to specific teams and they need to just drive early adoption for that. .

In order to do that, those workshops will feel more like both simulation and hands-on keyboard, a combination of both. We have clients that are giving us 22 different workflows to begin with and working with those teams for each workflow that need to reinvent their work. And in those cases, it's a combination of workshops.

We simulate what's possible together with them. We do ongoing coaching for the teams in terms of continual AI innovation and the change management associated with it. We're doing our executive advisory work like before. So it's a big mix of core capabilities and some net new.

Right. We had a question from Dauvet. If you could elaborate on the direct AI service revenues, what does that directly mean? And what kind of services are included in that?

It means our clients are saying, help us with our AI ambitions. And right now what those demands sound like we're not happy with the adoption of the tools per team or per role or for every employee in the company. So help us drive the adoption up. It's also -- we're realizing this is a cultural leadership issue. So help us get our leaders to shift to create the type of environments where their teams can experiment and innovate with AI.

It also sounds like, as I just mentioned, we want to have workflow specific AI adoption. So can you help us figure out who should be doing the workflow innovation across the team and then how do we make sure it gets done over the coming weeks and months. And then when a team actually drives an innovation that's so profound that we would need to change the ways of working.

Help us with the change management associated by getting everybody on board with the new way of working. And then the final piece, which is kind of at the end of that process is help us understand what it means for our teams to wake up every morning and manage agents. And that gets to token consumption and agent management and what type of -- like just how does that look and feel. Help us understand that and help our leaders understand what's coming. So those are kind of the 4 different buckets that we've been asked to support so far this year.

Right. And are there any specific types of projects that are driving the vast part of the 220% AR revenue growth? Or is it broad-based?

It's across all 4 of those categories. This kind of depends on what the companies are prioritizing right now -- it's -- yes, -- most of our clients other than software engineering still don't have very big innovations to look at and say, this is what it takes to reinvent how function works or a workflow works. And so I would say maybe as a generalization, they're shifting from 1 size fits all to specific functional workflow support, right? And that means that those teams could have different AI tools than other teams and IT has to work differently with those business units and functions.

And as they make that shift, there's a higher likelihood that they'll start to reap the benefits of AI.

Great. Then I had a question on the cash flow or more like the drivers behind it. So you tied up a little bit more working capital, specifically in Q2, but given that it was increased receivables, could we assume that the revenue growth accelerated throughout the quarter and that June was a little bit better than the start of the quarter.

Yes. That's correct.

Perfect. And then just on another sort of cost item. I think you talked a little bit about the global conference. Is there any specific types of costs that you maybe doesn't have regularly in Q2 if that sort of -- if you're able to quantify anything on that?

Yes. I mean that's correct, right? We have a history of doing conferences for our people. But -- I mean in the last 5 years, it's been a smaller group than the group we brought together in June -- and as a result for that -- and normally, our conference is in Q1 as opposed to Q2, right? So you're right in terms of the costs hit our second quarter.

However, it basically gets somewhat balanced out because there's less profit pool than that goes to get share to the employees. So it's not a one-to-one hit in the quarter, right, in terms of like the total cost to the bottom line. But yes, there was -- I mean, just a rough range even after we balance out what goes, I mean, just probably a rough range there was USD 500,000, USD 600,000, something like that.

All right. Then just on the the guidance upgrade or the sort of wording upgrade you had in the full year guidance. So I think we talked about on earlier conference calls or specifically in Q1 that you were tracking pretty well on this. But did Q2 surprise you on the positive note, making you upgrade the guidance? Or did you feel comfortable from the beginning?

Well, I think given North America's turnaround was only 1 quarter old, right, in the first quarter. We wanted to make sure we got to all of the second quarter and like really strongly about the second half of the year. Also, we have a history of changing guidance now as opposed to the quarter before. So kind of sticking with that consistent, what's expected to BTS in terms of when we change guidance, we chose to just stay with consistency of our historical approach. So it was more of the latter, right? And it's also always helpful to have another quarter and see how the turnaround continues. .

Great. And then I just had a question on other markets given the recovery that you expect that in the latter part of 2026. So -- can you give some color on how the sort of shift has started. You always talk about maybe 3 quarters before we see the actual turnaround. I think we saw a step in the right direction with improving organic growth from the lows in Q1. But can you elaborate a bit on how you've seen the development there?

Yes. I would say it's it's improving faster than we normally see. And as a result, we expect them to get to growth earlier in the second half than the end of the second half. And yes. I mean the -- a couple of the countries in Asia that had a really rough start are turning around quickly, which is really helpful. And then the other ones that are moving more slowly, we are taking out some costs in terms of office closures and all that, but more importantly, actually, the pipelines are growing -- and the in-market activities that we've done since February are bearing a strong pipeline, and we've had some good wins.

So you're right about historical typically takes 3 quarters. And right now, from what we can see, it will be faster than that. And then the rest of the unit is performing well so.

Great. And we had a specific question here from the chat. Do you expect EBITDA growth in other markets in Q3?

I do.

All right. And the other part of that question also was related to the balance sheet. So looks healthy, obviously. And if you had any comments on potential M&A or any other types of capital allocation possibilities, maybe? .

Yes. I mean, will we continue to be fans of making acquisitions in order to round out or to strengthen our geographical footprint, find great talent and add to the portfolio. So we will continue to do that. Our current pipeline of acquisitions, it's I would say there's 1 in particular, we're interested in the rest -- we need to build up the pipeline again right now. The last 12, 15 months have primarily been partnerships and trying different AI tech across the portfolio as needed. But yes, we have a nice list of countries that we'd love to make acquisitions in. Yes. So nothing immediate, but we expect that to continue. .

And a follow-up on that, but do you need any sort of specific services, et cetera, to to add or that you hope to acquire? Or is it more like geographical expansion or to reach other types of customers? .

First priority is geographical expansion. Second priority could be, we could bolster it probably with a boutique firm that is good at systems integration. That sounds similar to like an ERP or digital transformation of the past. But for some of the workflow work that we're helping our clients with in really complex cases, right? They need to have more support. And the way that we're balancing that right now is they're getting the support from their primary tech providers, right? So they're getting the forward deployed engineers from Palantir or from Anthropic or whatever to supplement.

And so I don't mean that we would go that deep in technical, but yes, that could probably help. We haven't lost deals because we're lacking it right now, but I can imagine that scale. -- consultants who are more able to do that would probably be helpful.

Great. I think we had another question from Jon Hiter. -- could , please.

Yes. The change in provision from the acquisition on that earn-out adjustment. Is this the final one? Or could it be more if it .

This is the final one. .

So it must have developed really, really well, then they are the targets .

Absolutely incredible. I mean, probably most successful when we've done ever so. .

After this earnout, is the whole team left or how does look? Yes. The founder is moving to a part-time full seller for us. and wants to continue to be the coach, and we have 2 successors that are stepping up in her place, and that was part of the earn-out rules. Not that she would move to part time, but that we would have 2 successors. 1 who will be Head of Sales and 1 who's running Head of Operations.

And we are going to start -- they know about it now. We're starting the transition real time, but she will not -- they're not not over until the end of April. And we're thrilled that she's staying on as a seller in a coach so.

Great. We had another question from the chat that reads as unit economics improve and your way of changing workflows continues, how should 1 expect your sales mix to change? -- licenses are still quite low percent of revenue, which 1 could expect maybe to increase given what you are saying.

Yes. Right. Yes. I mean right now, I don't see something that's really changing the mix so dramatically in the short term, right? If I think about it across all our deals and projects, they tend to be a mix still of consulting, facilitation, license, ongoing consulting as our clients see more and more support around changing the laser working. .

So -- and at the same time, the license is still driven by the cool new AI stuff that we've been working on the last couple of years and keeping our simulations modern. So I don't -- I think right now, I would expect the mix to kind of continue as is.

Perfect. I think that was all questions I had. If there's anyone else that has a question, if you could just please write it in the chat now or raise the hand. Can you just wait think, a few more seconds to see.

All right. Jessica, do we want to have some final remarks? .

No, I think so. I mean we're happy with the momentum. We feel like we have some wins at our back. So when rates are strong. We're excited for the second half I'm happy to see BTS Other markets, I think, turning around relatively quickly. So yes, for us, right now, we're focused on the fourth quarter and setting up next year. So that's how it feels inside BTS right now. Thanks, everybody. .

Thank you very much, Jessica, and thank you all for listening in. .

Okay. Bye.

Hi, everyone, and welcome to today's conference call together with BTS Group. My name is Ida Tillas. I work here at DNB Carnegie. And today, we are pleased to welcome Jessica Skon to the studio. As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask them in the live chat on the right hand of your screen.

So without further ado, Jessica, please.

Thank you very much. Good morning, dear investors. I am very happy to be with you today for our Q1 report, and I am super pleased to announce that BTS is back to profitable growth and we expect that to continue.

Our revenue at the group level grew 5% in the first quarter, while EBITA grew 19%. We're very pleased that our North America turnaround is complete. BTS Europe continues to do fantastically from a growth perspective and a profit growth perspective. And BTS Other markets had a rough start to the year, and we expect them to recover during the second half.

So if we double-click into the 2 or the 3 different markets. And the other thing that I'll go deep on is that AI continues to be a very strong force for good for the firm, both in terms of our competitiveness and driving growth and in terms of our internal abilities to reinvent ourselves and drive productivity.

So if we look at BTS North America, back to profitable growth. Just to remind you, it was a year ago that we declared we wanted to do a turnaround in North America. We shifted out the leadership, and many different leaders took new roles. We had 3 core strategies at that time, which was to make sure that in every proposal, we were using our most advanced AI technology products and services, and we are helping our clients with their AI ambitions.

We decided to focus more on the core of BTS, which is training, leadership development, sales and activating strategy and change, and, of course, focus all of our time and attention with our clients, helping them to reinvent themselves and stronger commercial activity. And these worked. In the first quarter, we are back to growth with 8% growth in revenue and a 50% improvement in our profitability.

BTS Europe continues to have very strong growth. That's due to the high win rates over the last year, those projects continuing to move and a bunch of small projects that we won in the fourth quarter. They had 17% revenue growth, all of which was organic. And we're seeing significant growth in 2 of our large markets with a lot of growth potential, which is France and Germany.

BTS Other markets, we expect them to have a recovery later this year, and their profit dropped in the first quarter, which was primarily due to Southeast Asian operations, in particular, our team in Thailand, Japan and Korea. We have, of course, many actions underway that we've been addressing for the last few months.

We have -- given that this market went down in revenues, we are moving resources around most of the world market. And so the countries that are having strong growth can continue to drive growth and use those resources. We have a much stronger revenue growth plan.

We have strength in leadership. We've moved some -- a very strong partner for one market over to Southeast Asia. They're more dividing and conquering. We have a more industry-focused kind of client-backed approach in terms of our go-to-market activities and so forth.

One bright spot in Other markets. Despite the war, our Middle East team is having very healthy double-digit growth in the first quarter, and we expect that to continue in the second quarter.

And our summary on AI for the moment is actually we are in the sweet spot, right now, both for helping our clients in terms of evolving their companies to take advantage of the AI movement, AI era, but also in terms of our ability to invent internally at BTS, making our products more competitive and driving absolute breakthrough efficiencies and productivity gains for the firm.

If we look at the statistics behind this, our core AI booking revenue, meaning helping our clients with their AI evolution, grew 35% in the first quarter. The AI product bookings went up 3x from a year ago.

I believe, we've been studying this and we help our clients do this, that BTS is in the top 5% of global companies right now because not only have we achieved clear ROI from AI, but we've done it 3x, and we can see more coming in the future. And we can take all of those applied AI learnings around how we've disrupted our own products and services, our own workflows and help our clients able to do the same thing.

More and more, week by week, day by day, through our own experiences, this could not be more different from digital transformation of the past. This is a people, a leadership and a culture issue. This is not a technology issue.

Internally, we've talked about this all of last year. The productivity gains from our own AI workflow reinvention in last year in 2025 is equaling SEK 74 million in annual savings this year in 2026. And all of this is great, and it's very exciting. And maybe equally important and exciting to stress is that the core of BTS demand remains very strong.

BTS has never been a traditional consulting firm, right? And our core is about building breakthrough experiences and simulations in offsite. So top 500 meetings, top 50 meetings, CEO, C-suite meetings. We pull people out and they simulate the thing they're trying to get done or the future of their firm. And clients are choosing to spend a lot more money and time bringing their people together, which I think is the counterbalance to the AI and the technology.

And then we're also good at scaling adoption and change. And right now, we have clients saying, 25,000 people just got Claude. Can you help us with the activation, the adoption and then the shifts that are going to come from that? So that's working at scale to support adoption and change.

And as I mentioned last time, the team is doing a really nice job of attracting some of the best AI companies as our clients. I'm very, very proud of that. So that's the quarter.

If we take a step back and just remind ourselves like why is BTS a great investment. We are back to sustained profitable growth. AI is creating more opportunities for growth for the firm and improve productivity internally, while our core remains in strong demand. And our growth has been and will continue to be capital light.

If we just click on all 3 of these for a minute. The first one, back to sustained profitable growth. We have an amazing global client list. We operate in 24 countries. We have been very innovative in how companies learn, change and perform for 40 years, and it is particularly important right now with a very unique value proposition.

We still only have 1%, maybe max 2% of the global market share in our space, and we are way ahead of the competition in terms of our simulation capabilities and how we're using AI. And I would say sustained growth is in our DNA. It's what the company knows. It's what we're proud of. It's how we know to operate and grow talent.

We've had 13% revenue CAGR from the time we went public to 2022. The years from 2022 to 2025 was held back simply for one reason. It was 1 unit out of 3 and the mistakes that we made in that unit that was dragging us down. 2026 forward, our biggest unit, North America, is back to growth at 8% revenue and 50% profit improvement. And we expect that growth to continue this year and into 2027.

The second one, I've already made these comments, So I can skip over it. And the third one, our growth is capital light, right? So if you think about the history of the firm, we've grown 12x since our IPO. Roughly 2/3 of that has been organic. We've paid for a great number of acquisitions during this process. Despite that, we also give about 50% on average of our profit through dividends.

We've asked for no capital, no new capital from our shareholders. We have a very strong net cash position and our cash conversion is 97% over the last 12 months. So the outlook for the year remains unchanged, and I will remind you that we never change our outlook after the first quarter.

So thank you very much, and happy to answer your questions.

Perfect. Thank you, Jessica. So starting off with a question from Johan Sunden at DNB Carnegie. When do you expect licensing revenue in North America to show year-over-year growth again? You delivered quarter-over-quarter growth in Q1.

Great question. This year would be my guess, my best feeling on that. Yes, we continue to get a lot of demand for our simulations, which licensing is a part of. We're working at scale more and more and at speed because of the breakthroughs and how we -- our ability to build our simulations. So sometime this year.

Sometime this year.

Yes.

And are you finished with the cost cuts take in North America? Or are there more to come?

We're not finished.

Not finished. More to come.

Yes, there's so much innovation happening, right? And with AI, there's a lot of small innovations that are going on and then something big happens. And when something big happens, it's very disruptive and then it requires transformative look at the team that you need and the roles that you have. And for sure, there'll be more to come.

We also have a question here from the chat from [ Marcus Ramstrand ]. So the report talks about changes to U.S. tax legislation in 2025 that's affecting BTS North America. Is it possible for you to guide concerning the tax rate for BTS going forward?

I'll come back to you on that.

How has the win rates developed in Q1 in the various divisions? And how does that compare to Q3 for 2025 and Q4 '25?

So we see a pretty strong correlation in the win rates with our growth in the units that had strong growth in the first quarter, even though there's usually a delay, right? So win rates in Europe remain strong. Win rates in North America remain strong.

Win rates in our 5 core strong markets in most of the world feel good, which the issue then is goes back to Asia, as I mentioned. So I will say, though, that the pipeline is growing there. And we sense that the turnaround is likely in the second half.

Okay. And speaking of Other markets and Asia, how serious is the issues that you witnessed in Q1? And is there a risk that the turnaround in H2 does not materialize?

I mean, there's always a risk. Historically, at BTS, most of our bigger unit turnarounds take about 3 quarters, right? That said, given everything we can see right now in terms of deals won and proposals and the movement, we feel like they've got the right energy and the right steps in place. So...

So hopefully, H2 then. Perfect. Sorry, there's so much questions. So this is Daniel Thorsson from ABG. Great. How much of the SEK 74 million annual savings in 2026 are expected to be reinvested in growth opportunities versus purely lower operating costs?

Vast majority is lower operating costs. I mean, we will continue to hire, but this is net bottom line gain.

Thank you. And also Daniel Thorsson, ABG. What sectors and countries are driving the positive start in Europe?

Yes. France and Germany, in particular. Defense sector. Strangely aerospace. It's -- we're pretty spread out, and there isn't kind of one simple big growth industry for us.

Okay. So it's kind of mix, all over.

It's mixed, yes.

Okay. So [indiscernible]. Hi, Jessica, there has been talk about the third AI savings program before. Can you tell us anything about that and how that pans out?

Yes. I mean, it has to do with another breakthrough in how we deliver one part of our portfolio, right? And similar to the last ones, that means, in general, places we might have had 7 unique roles to deliver particular products or service, that gets collapsed into 1, 2 or 3 depending on the client problem. So it's very similar from that perspective. And we're working through the implications of that right now. So...

Great.

I'll just say it will be smaller in scope than on the last big one, but it's still meaningful.

And a follow-up on the year-over-year trends in the North America licensing revenue question from Johan. You guided on Q2, Q3 in your Q4 report. Has your view changed after the Q1 report, the outlook? Or is it still the same?

For North America?

Yes, on the licensing.

On the licensing in particular?

Yes.

I think it's still the same. No change.

No change? Same?

Yes.

Let's see if I missed. Oscar Ronnkvist is asking, please elaborate on the comments about software clients being a little bit more cautious. Can you tell us some more about that?

What was it called? The SaaSmargeddon, Armageddon of the SaaS company, right? So when Claude released their latest products. Maybe the simplest way to talk about this is how we're thinking about it inside BTS because we're also a client of many of these software companies, right?

And my experience with the Claude product, in particular, is it's essentially kind of wrapped my desktop, right? So when I'm using Claude and when I'm doing my work because of the natural plug-ins to Slack and Box and Salesforce and all of that, I don't go into those files or those software holders really anymore. I'm kind of working on top of it. And so the world realized that, right?

So the big question right now is what are the traditional software companies going to do to remain at the highest level on the stack versus what's the LLM models going to do to create their plug-ins and then push them down, right? And that's going to be the fight for some time, I'm assuming years.

So that's what they're wrestling with. That's the fear, that's the reality. We'll see how it plays out. And -- but I think what's really important for BTS is that, of course, we continue to help the traditional software SaaS companies, but that the best -- some of the best, most leading AI companies right now are choosing to partner with us. And we're super proud of that, and that's where hyper growth is.

Nice. Oscar Ronnkvist is asking how has bookings year-over-year developed in North America?

Fine. Good. It's not a red flag at the moment.

Yes. Okay. Sweet. So we're down to the final question. So if you have anything else, please write it in the chat. So we will cover that before we sum up.

So final question on the guidance going forward. How confident are you in sustaining your trajectory through H2? And what are the key risks basically going forward, H2?

The main risk is the turnaround in Asia for most of the world. And currently, I will just say the 3 units feel very similar to the first quarter. So it feels like we're kind of marching with a similar narrative here in the second quarter.

Okay. So we got a few more here. Can you walk us through how your unit economies have changed in each step of your delivery from internal AI, both development programs and license? It's a big question.

Well, I think if we take that lens, what's maybe the most important thing to understand is the biggest AI innovation we've had is how we develop custom simulations for our clients, which is still the most maybe differentiated part of the firm and it's the history of the firm. That's what we're most known for.

And what the new AI-enhanced approach does is it speeds up the time from when a client wants one to when they can have it. And you can look at that from 2 lenses. What the first quarter showed us over time or over the first quarter is that we sold way more simulations than we have in the past.

I can tell you just in one unit, for example, in North America, the most we've ever done in a year was around 74. The team did 55 in the first quarter. That means that there is a lot of client requests that are saying, "Hey, I'm calling you out of the blue. In 2 weeks, could you deliver a custom simulation for this meeting?" And in the past, we would have said that's impossible.

It takes us 3 or 4 months to build it. Now, "Yes, of course, we can. We'd love to. Let's meet with your executive team and get this thing going." So it opens up fast-paced client needs that we can respond to.

Now at the same time, if you're only getting paid 2 weeks to build something that used to take you 3 months, that could be looked as a down. But with the volume and the growth, so as long as the growth is there, the margins are much higher on each project. So that's the implication on the development versus delivery versus license.

Bottom line is our clients can consume some of the coolest parts of what BTS has to offer with speed and have access to it. And for our long-time loyal clients, this is a dream for them because they've always said we wish we could do 50 of these simulations with you instead of 2, but like we can't afford it or whatever.

And so right now, it's a very net positive for us. Yes, that's the biggest change. We haven't seen a change in the pricing of the revenue with the delivery. And then on the license side, as I mentioned last year, some of our license is just content and the market -- the content market has completely changed, but it's a small percentage of the total business. So...

Thank you. Looking at your profitability and margins strengthening this quarter, would you say it's mostly OpEx related? Or are any underlying shifts in the project profitability here?

Yes. It's both. It's what I just explained in terms of the profitability to build the simulations and the AI breakthroughs there. And then it's the OpEx savings that came along with the invention of how to build our simulations, which is much smaller teams now, a lot less back and forth between the operational teams and the customer teams. That's a big change.

Combination of both.

Yes.

And what do you need to see to upgrade your FY guidance, which looks cautious given the easy comps in BTS North America?

Yes. I mean, I just want to reiterate that we don't change our guidance after the first quarter. And so we don't have to change much.

And what would you say you'd need to see in order to...

Nothing.

This is how it goes.

Yes.

Thank you. And -- so can you give us some more color on what you're actually doing when you act as a partner of choice for AI companies? Maybe you covered that a little bit already, but...

I'm super happy to do that because I think it's profound. I think it's profound for the world. right? And it has potentially a really big opportunity for BTS. So what we are doing is we are helping clients understand that they can actually trust their people and their teams to reinvent their work.

And with AI, because it's so surgical in nature, you need people to work activity by activity for the innovation to become unlocked, right? And the people who are best suited to do that are the people who do the work, okay? So we help them create the more innovative conditions, hands-on keyboard, scaled, getting the teams to start to use AI to rethink their workflows.

That's the first step. And we do that. I can tell you, we have one client that said 22,000 people are going to go on Claude. Can you help activate and adopt that? We will organize all of those scaled, hands-on keyboard sessions, role specific.

The same client said, we have 22 workflows that we want to kick off. So think marketing or inside sales or whatever the workflows are. Can you guide and work with those teams and those teams' bosses to create the conditions for low-scale innovation, but then the conditions for a really big AI breakthrough? That's half of -- and the other thing that client said is we want to rethink our strategic planning process with AI.

So the first step is how can we get some automation. They have like 9,000 data points that go into it. And when you start to go in with an automation lens with AI and a strategic planning process, what happens naturally when you're doing that, the team starts to think differently about the actual process itself. So then working with them and their leadership team on how to improve it for the next year.

So that's one client example. I think it's a very good illustrative view of what we're seeing. And this is a big shift because I would say through last year, most of our clients were still thinking either we're just getting started or everyone in the company has one AI tool, and we're not really seeing a very big return yet, right?

But I think what I just expressed is kind of the next wave. And so we help create the more innovative conditions for the teams to reinvent their own work. And then we call that flywheels. And then once a breakthrough happens, like what's happened at BTS in a few spots, we call it an AI diamond, then we help with the global adoption and change management of the new ways of working around that diamond.

And the second half is when you start to see P&L value creation. So that's it. That's how we're helping. And we're just taking what our teams needed to do both of those steps. And they feel very different.

One is more playful, more innovative, more tinkering, more creative and the other one feels like a transformation, right? But a transformation with cool new tech, that's a lot easier to adopt than, let's say, an ERP implementation in the past. So I hope that's helpful.

That's very helpful. It's a very interesting shift.

Yes, definitely. Yes.

And also on the topic of AI, given your increasing speed for each project, how much have your average invoice decreased for each project?

I actually don't have that data point. So I can come back on that. Yes.

And there was a question from Karl. And he has a follow-up question as well. Could you dig a bit deeper into the development of the license revenue? When do you expect license revenue to start increasing year-over-year again?

It's a balance between the old school license revenue and the new school license revenue, right? So on the data point that our AI products and services have gone up 3x, that is license revenue, right? It's just that's, I think, around SEK 6 million or something in bookings, which was nothing 4 quarters ago, right? And so that one is growing big.

The old school, as I mentioned, content and some standard training workshops that have been in place for a few years, that's dropping. So I don't know when the -- exactly when the turnover effect is going to happen. My best guess right now would be the end of this year, probably, but we need to go deeper in it.

Perfect. Okay. So I think that was it. There's a lot of questions in the chat, but I think we covered it all. It's been a lot of AI, North America, licenses. Do you want to have a few seconds to just wrap up the quarter?

Sure. I would just say, I think everybody feels good. We feel great that the biggest unit turnaround is complete and that we see the success of both the AI internal innovations and the competitiveness of our products and the top line growth and the bottom line, in particular, performance in North America. So we're proud about that.

And the -- we're very proud of our growing partnership with Anthropic and some deals at Google and some other cool clients there. So we're set up for hyper growth from that industry.

Yes. Europe is doing great. And the 5 biggest units in most of the world are doing very well. They're just dragged down right now by a few of the countries in Asia. So that's the story.

Perfect. Thank you so much for coming, and thank you, everyone, for listening in.

Okay. Thank you.

Thanks.

Okay. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Q4 presentation with BTS. My name is Daniel Thorsson, analyst at ABG Sundal Collier. And with us today, we have Jessica Skon, CEO of BTS. So I'll let you present the fourth quarter. I will have a couple of questions afterwards. And for both analysts and investors joining the call, feel free to add questions in the chat, and I will ask Jessica the questions afterwards.

Perfect. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Good morning. So let me start with an executive summary. Q4 marks a turning point for us. It brings an end to our quarter-over-quarter decline in profit results for the last 3 quarters. Just to remind you, 2 out of our 3 units delivered growth in 2025, and we expect Europe and other markets to continue to deliver the revenue and profit growth during 2026. The North America turnaround, which has been all of our focus for the last 2 quarters, is progressing very well. The unit is expected to return to moderate organic revenue growth and significantly improved quarter-over-quarter EBITDA performance already in the first quarter.

We have continued to have breakthrough AI innovations during 2025, which is benefiting us in 3 significant very strategic ways. Number one, we have a much more competitive portfolio, one that we are getting daily feedback from our clients that is ahead of our competition within our space. Number two, we have implemented and pushed new services that help our clients with their own AI maturity and adoption going from initial training to workflow reinvention. And number three, which has just been absolutely profound, and we're learning from ourselves and bringing it to the market, is we continue to, I would call it, radical simplification of our internal operations. And in the fourth quarter, we even had a second wave of breakthroughs, which led to productivity gains. And we expect to reestablish earnings growth throughout 2026.

We go into more details. The fourth quarter 2025, yes, it was a continued weak revenue performance in BTS North America, which we're very disappointed by, which resulted in a poor quarter. This wasn't a surprise. It was seen for the last few quarters, but it marks an end to that trend. Almost half of the Q4 profit decline was due to noncore things. So it was due to a mix of currency headwinds and then the severance that was related to our AI-based rationalization in the fourth quarter. BTS Europe had a revenue slowdown in the fourth quarter, but that was temporary. And Q4, the year before was an exceptionally strong quarter. BTS Other Markets had solid growth, but profit decline, which was due to BTS operations in Asia and specifically in our Thailand operations, Korea and China.

If we're looking forward to the full year or if you look go backwards to the fiscal year 2025, obviously, this was a very disappointing year for us with no growth, a 25% decline in EBITDA. But it's important, I think, to remember the real story of 2025. It's a mixed picture. BTS operates in 3 units. 2 of the units, which is half of the business performed very well, very well, and you could say in a tough market, especially in Europe. So with continued growth in BTS Europe and BTS Other markets in both top line and bottom line. Half of the business did poorly. That was North America, with very weak revenue and profit performance.

We've made a lot of organizational shifts back in June and the organizational turnaround is progressing very well, both from bookings when rates are up, opportunity pipeline is growing and so forth. We are very proud of the year. It was not wasted in true BTS fashion. We are, I think, can be very proud of our internal AI innovations and our external ones, and we're bringing those learnings to the market. So if we look forward into 2026, as I mentioned, the BTS North America turnaround is progressing very well. The unit we expect will return to organic revenue growth in the first quarter with significantly improved profit already in the first quarter, which should be 1 quarter ahead of schedule.

We expect BTS Europe and other markets to continue to deliver on revenue and bottom line performance in 2026, and the AI innovation will continue to benefit us in 2026. If I double-click into the AI innovations of the year, I've made a time line for you all. Basically, we made a Wonderway acquisition in 2024, which you remember. That gave us kind of an AI technology platform that does AI conversational practice. In the first 4 quarters, basically of its existence, we have it in 115 different projects, 28,000 users, and we have clients who are now doing self-service on that platform. But in addition to that, we've launched an AI super companion coach that goes across our leadership development initiatives. On our executive communication practice, we've launched a Digital Mirror.

To support our end-to-end coaching portfolio, we have AI coaching fit for purpose, 3 different offerings for our clients. And these AI coaching offerings are not stand-alone. They're also integrated in Teams, Slack and Salesforce CRM. We have retrofitted and completely changed our simulation platforms across the business, giving our clients the ability to enjoy speed to develop, scale to deploy and for some clients who want to, they can build their own simulations. And within our CRM offering, we've also launched an agentic practice offering for our go-to-market sales clients. It was a really big year of innovation for BTS. If you add up the revenue associated with our AI services and our AI technology, it was $19.6 million in bookings last year, which will obviously carry forward into 2026.

And so now as we -- when we talk to our clients about partnering with them, we have our traditional practices, which you're used to seeing, and we've built those out with your support over the years. And now we're overlaying essentially our own AI technology offering across our practice areas. And the feedback that we're getting in the market is, yes, there's plenty of shiny objects and HR tech start-ups, but most of our large clients are looking for an integrator. They're consolidating. They're looking for less vendors. And I think BTS is very well positioned to play that role. We have been innovating with companies for 40 years, how they learn, how they drive change, how they improve performance, and now it feels like the beginning of the next era.

Of course, the AI productivity gains that we did in 2025 are going to have a material impact on 2026. So just to remind you, the total severance that was paid in 2025 was SEK 8 million in Q2 and Q3 and another SEK 10 million in December. Resulting in 2026, $5 million reduction in costs from our May AI breakthroughs and $2.6 million reduction in operating costs based on our Phase II AI breakthroughs, and we expect more to come. I would say a realistic conservative estimate in 2026 is probably about USD 1 million, SEK 10 million. And best feel on that right now is the majority of that would start to hit in the third quarter. So given all of this, we believe that our results will be better than 2025. This would be consistent with how BTS historically starts the year. Thank you very much.

Excellent. Thank you very much, Jessica. I have a couple of questions, but just to let everybody know that if you have questions, feel free to write them in the chat and the Q&A field, and I will ask them to Jessica. But I start off with one in North America in Q1. You are extremely clear on recovering to growth in Q1 and also see profit going up in the first quarter versus last year. Is that driven by what you have seen in January, February or what you expect to see in March kind of...

Both.

Both. Okay. So it has started off well and you expect to see it continue throughout Q1. It's not only that you started off slower in January, but you see that we're going to do a lot in March, and that's going to save the day.

No. we're not hoping for a hockey stick in March.

Yes. I see. That's very clear. And on the guidance in 2026, would you consider the EBITDA guidance to be driven mainly by sales growth or lower costs if you have to divide them? It's obviously both. But which is the biggest one.

You can imagine how good it's going to be with good growth, right? So -- but it's -- I would say it is 50-50. We expect double-digit revenue growth in Europe and other markets to continue. And we expect North America, at least in the first half to have moderate organic growth. And because we did so much cost savings, that's kind of the cherry on top, right? So...

I see. And on AI, you share very interesting proofs here with numbers, et cetera. While we can all see the reality that the global stock markets are extremely fared about AI for global management consulting firms, software firms, everything. And all the companies I talk to at least, they haven't really seen anything on the threat downside, but they see all the favors they can do internally. So where do you think the reality is on what you see? Do you see that your customers have a lower demand because of AI recently? Or do you only see that you can favor from it? Because there's a big discrepancy.

I mean, obviously, there's things that are in favor for BTS, and there are things that are posing challenges for us. Some interesting proof points, and I didn't mention this yet in the presentations, but an additional advantage for BTS is a new client base opportunities. So if you think of the AI hypergrowth companies to go after as clients, our West Coast office, in particular, is doing a great job of that. In fact, I can tell you that Anthropic has chosen us as their go-to-market enablement partner. That's the company behind Claude, for example. And they're using us both for our approach to driving change and enablement, but also using our technology as kind of an evidence point that there's also a new customer base, which is very exciting for our team.

If I think about how the clients are reacting to the moment, I would say they shifted quite a lot over the course of the year. They started the year being very apprehensive, very slow to adopt AI. Many of the buyers saying we can't have it yet in our function and IT is on lockdown and they're only giving everybody one tool. By the end of the year, we saw much more of a stronger appetite to experiment, right? In terms of how can we do leadership development differently? How can we drive scale change? What should we do for our sellers? And BTS do have ideas on how to do things differently. I think they're still slow in general, but I think the appetite is changing. Yes, maybe I'll let you ask follow-up questions because there's probably a lot to...

No, that's fair. We'll take one from the chat here from Oscar Ronnkvist from SEB. You say significantly improved EBITDA already in Q1. Can you specify what it means in terms of EBITDA year-over-year when it's up significantly and not only quarter-over-quarter in absolute terms?

I mean we're basically doing what we've historically done, right, which is we start the year if we see it, look better than as a forecast, and then we learn more as the months progress. But North America, in particular, because of the cost savings that we did in 2025, plus the return to moderate organic growth in the first quarter is what gives us the confidence. And for us, significantly better is 15% or higher.

Okay. That's clear. The second question from Johan Sunden. It's related to this as well. How good visibility do you have for EBITDA outcome in North America in Q1 '26? It's probably similar to my question already. But the follow-up is how is license revenue expected to develop quarter-over-quarter and also year-over-year in North America in Q1?

We have good visibility. We're halfway into the quarter right now in terms of cost and revenue. In terms of license development quarter-over-quarter in North America, it's a mixed story on license. It's like old school and new school, right? So on the old school stuff, fortunately, for us, only about 2% of the company's total revenue is related to content license, and I kind of think that market is dead, right? And so we don't have that much more license for our clients to cancel from us on the content side.

And at the same time, growth in our Verity product from the Wonderway acquisition and those AI technologies that I shared with you are progressing very well. So there will be a turning point sometime in 2026, where the license of the new products helps our overall license picture grow, right? My best gut feel is that will probably happen by the third quarter, but it's -- it will be a mixed bag until then. You don't anticipate any major decline in license, let me just to be clear. So it's more iterations here or there client by client.

Yes, because licenses were down in Q3 and Q4 year-over-year.

Yes, yes.

Okay. So not much more from this level down. Johan Sunden also had a follow-up on the EBITDA margins in North America, how they are expected to develop year-over-year in Q1. You already answered that by saying profits up more than 15%. I don't know if you would like to add anything on margins, but...

Not really, but it will be significantly better.

Yes. No, true. We have another one on capital allocation. With a record low valuation, trading at 7x the EBITDA you actually did in 2025 and you expect growth in 2026. Why does the Board not consider buybacks as an alternative to drive extra growth?

Yes, yes, we've been talking about that.

Okay. And what was the conclusion?

We have not concluded yet. It's been discussed.

Okay. Discussed not concluded yet. I see. And then we have a question from Jonathan [indiscernible]. Could you please help one understand dynamics in the license sales as a percentage of revenue? It has historically been around 10% of sales, but it is now 7% and total sales are down. So that's down even more.

This is specifically unique to the North American market. And in the fourth quarter, there was one deal that we had done in the last 3 years with one more traditional software company, not an AI growth company. And they did not renew that in the fourth quarter. Instead, they said, we're not going to work this way with you because it was a new buyer, new budgets, but you're going to continue to be our partner this year. So we couldn't take that revenue in the fourth quarter like we had year-over-year. That's the real reason behind the decline in the fourth quarter.

Do you think licenses will be back to 10% of sales over time?

They do.

Yes, over time, in detail?

Yes, because we have a whole bunch of new technology now that's unique and in demand and supportive of the value proposition. So...

Excellent. We have another one from Oscar Ronnkvist at SEB. Can you add some color on the magnitude or quantify the positive orders in North America? I guess it is up year-over-year.

Sure. I mean I think, I think the data point I can share with everybody here is that the bookings in North America in the fourth quarter was around 25% or 26% higher than the fourth quarter the year before. It was actually over 40%, but then when I took out the decline from that one renewal, we brought it down to 26%, 27%. That's probably the best data point I can give you in terms of increased demand coming into the -- into 2026.

Perfect. We'll see. I think we have a couple of more here. License revenue, again, they are still under pressure. How important are these for your margins going forward?

This is going to sound silly, but not that important in the short term. And with, if the AI tech can take off in terms of the portfolio of the new products, it will be significant upside.

Okay. Clear. And can you elaborate a bit on how your license revenue works? Are there -- are these onetime fees for perpetual licenses? Or are those recurring?

Thank you for the clarification. The license -- the old school license, which is the majority of our license, do not have a renewal date on them typically. Maybe that's 5% of them did that, right? Most of them were initiative based, and it was clients saying, okay, we want you to build a custom simulation for us, but we want to bring it in-house and deliver it and do the rollout, and we'll pay you license for the use of that simulation as a onetime event. And typically, they use it then for somewhere between 3 to 12 months and then it's over. The new tech offering has renewal dates, and it's just a different -- slightly different, more sticky service.

Okay. That's clear. How should we think about employee growth in 2026? You are still a consulting firm, have been driven by a number of employees historically, maybe less so in the future, but how do you think?

Yes. So there's 2 categories of employees. There's our billable consultants who generate revenues for us and then there's the operational staff, right? And the operational staff about a year ago was 41% of our total employee base, and we could see we are going to have quite improvements in that total percentage. So I expect the number of operational staff to continue to decline, and we are expecting to increase the number of our billable consultants and revenue generators in all 3 markets this year.

Okay. So net-net, you feel rightsized if we exclude future M&A, obviously, but on an organic basis?

In terms of total headcount delta, the interesting...

In '26.

Yes. Obviously, the billable consultants are more expensive than the operational ones. We have plenty and low market as well. It's probably going to be about flat, to be honest.

Cool. Fair enough. And we have another question from Jon Hyltner. You say that you expect growth in Q1 '26. That refers to year-over-year growth, I assume, you said. And is that both for the group and for North America?

Correct. That's quarter compared to Q1 the year before, and that would be both for North America and for the group.

For the group. Excellent. That's clear. We have another one here. Could you elaborate a bit on how your unit economics have changed after this new AI revolution in BTS?

Not that much yet. So if you look at the average pricing across our services, we have had very little change, both in the fees we're charging to build and customize and co-create and the fees that we're using to deploy. That said, given the new simulation platforms, it is faster for us to do the customization and the co-creation process, right? So I think that our speed will yield smaller upfront fees in some cases, which will allow us to deploy faster.

And for us, the revenue is in the deployment. So that's the profitable part of the business, and our clients usually want to move quickly. So I think overall, it will be beneficial to us to get to deploy faster than to quickly customize or co-create. That will be the biggest change. And then with the AI technology with much higher margins on that offering, that would obviously be the other one.

I see. I also have a question on the full year guidance on '26 that EBITDA will be better than last year. If we look at the nonrecurring items in 2025, only -- if we assume 0 in '26 as a base case, that will drive 10% EBITDA growth.

Correct.

On a flat underlying performance, and you already guide for growth in Q1 and for lower costs full year '26.

Yes.

Doesn't it sound like a significantly better EBITDA guidance rather than a better EBITDA guidance?

Sure does. And we always start the year this way.

I know. Excellent. I will see if we have any final questions in the chat. No, we don't. And I had the opportunity to have mine, and we got all the questions from the chat as well. So -- thank you very much. If you would like to have any final words, otherwise, I think this Q4 presentation is finalized with BTS.

Super. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Okay. Good morning all, and good evening, Jessica. It's Daniel Thorsson here from ABG, who will host this morning's conference call with BTS and the CEO, Jessica Skon. So very much welcome for all joining. Analysts have joined through a separate link, so you should be able to ask questions verbally in the Q&A session. I will open up for that in the end. But just saying welcome to Jessica, and feel free to go ahead and present the Q3 report. Thank you very much.

Super. Thank you very much, Daniel. Hello, BTS investors. Welcome to the Q3 report from BTS. We're not happy with the quarter. It was a tough quarter. At the group level, we grew 3%, but we had a profit decline of negative 16% if you adjust for foreign currency exchanges and negative 25% if you include the currency effect. So let's walk you through and kind of demystify what's behind the profit drop in the third quarter. There's really 2 big reasons. Number one is something I'm going to tell you about in North America and number two is negative currency effect.

So North America, you can see the decline of SEK 10.3 million in the third quarter. One big reason for this, 65% behind North America's drop has to do with one particular customer engagement sold through our APG channel of a more traditional BTS product. And the reason why this was particularly painful is because it's kind of a pure license play, which means the value drops, the vast majority drops to the bottom line compared to our other services.

And when you compare this license revenue through the APG channel in this quarter compared to a year ago, it had a significant impact on the profit. If you look at the impact of the weak dollar, it's about 28% behind North America's profit drop. If we look at BTS Other markets, it's really 2 things. One is we decided to increase our marketing investments. So we had a lot of client events and dinners and roundtables in the third quarter compared to a year ago. And then, of course, it's also the adverse currency impacts, which makes up 50% of the decline in BTS Other markets profit. And BTS Europe had a plus. They performed well. They increased their profit in the third quarter. They continue to do well. Still a tough market in Europe, but they've been performing quite strongly, and we do see some slowed growth happening or happening right now in the fourth quarter.

So bottom line is the poor results and profit in the third quarter despite a 3% growth is because of the negative effect in currency and also the one client deal through the APG channel, but because it's a high license deal compared to a year ago, had a disproportionate impact on the profit. If we go to North America, our biggest market, which to remind you, we are in turnaround mode. We're 1 quarter in. We've changed the leadership team and put a lot of efforts into turning this market around.

We see the turnaround still as on track. And on track for us means we shared with you last time that we expected to get back to growth in the first half of 2026. A couple of highlights to talk about BTS North America, that Phase 1 of our AI efficiency has been moved into full effect. The benefits of this in the third quarter is the underlying cost for BTS North America have been reduced by 2% and our revenue employee is up by 10% in the core business. We have also added more sellers into the third quarter. We have much higher win rates. I'm very proud of this. Just to give you a sense, at the lowest point in North America this year towards the end of the first quarter, our win rates were mid- to high 20%, which is pretty unacceptable. We are back up to our sweet spot of 61% win rates across all deals in the third quarter and 71% win rates across deals over SEK 500,000.

We've also won some really new great strategic clients, both some of the new tech hypergrowth companies as well as in other industries. If you look at the profit performance of what I'd call [NAMS] organic profit outside of the APG channel and the profit that's sold through the channel, the profit was stable in the third quarter, even though the revenue was soft. So we're feeling good about that.

Our Executive Coaching business continues to grow. It's very successful. That was from the Boda acquisition a couple of years ago. And then Sounding Board, the scaled coaching acquisition from the first quarter turned to profit in the third quarter as well. They're performing on plan. The integration is going well, and we continue to win very big end-to-end global coaching deals, which was the whole idea behind the acquisition. So yes, I mean, bottom line in BTS North America, we're still in the turnaround. No quick hit win 1 quarter in. Historically, when we have to turn around parts of the business, it typically takes 3 quarters. And right now, we feel like everything we're seeing in terms of top of the funnel activities and win rates and presence in the market, we believe that we'll be back to growth in the first half of 2026.

BTS Europe continued to grow in the third quarter after a super strong start to the year, and they have a healthy margin. The demand is gradually slowing down to more kind of typical rates that you would see from a BTS business. And in the fourth quarter, we do think that the revenue is actually going to soften a bit. That said, they have a really strong pipeline. Their win rates are super competitive and high.

Their activities were, I think, up 60% in the third quarter compared to Q3 a year ago. And so we feel pretty strong about Europe's 2026 start to the year. APG, which is the channel in BTS North America, which is getting a lot of attention in this quarter report. They continue to decline, slow market for them, reduced project scopes and the cancellation of licenses across some of their client base.

As I mentioned to you, when BTS can sell our standard products through that channel, and typically, that's like a standard simulation that the clients will facilitate themselves, that's pure profit for BTS North America's business. And one of the things we've done, just given APG's decline over the last quarters plus the pain that we felt in the third quarter, we took some fast action. I shifted the APG's reporting structure to me since I'm in the North America market, and I can drive faster synergies and energy there again.

And then we've bolstered the plan and how we're going to support APG through 2 of our major practice areas. If we look at BTS Other markets, we had I would say, more kind of macroeconomic impacts, specifically in Southeast Asia and specifically in Thailand, which contributed to slower growth than we were expecting in the third quarter, and we continue to see it being soft in the fourth quarter as well.

Balancing to that though, however, in the third quarter and in the fourth quarter is strength in the Middle East business. We also expect the fourth quarter to be strong in our Spain business, Latin America and so forth. And as we mentioned, BTS Other markets did a lot of client events and dinners. They were very successful, very well received.

They generated a lot of leads, and those will start to pay off in the first quarter. From an AI perspective, I'm really proud of this. Our AI services are continuing to grow at kind of hyper speed. Our bookings of AI-related adoption services have now reached 10.3 million year-to-date, which is up [482%] from the same period last year. Our Verity platform, which is part of the Wonderway acquisition a couple of years ago, bookings has now reached $4 million, which is 15x bigger than the same period last year and 33% growth from the second quarter.

We are having a lot of fun right now in terms of meeting with clients and partnering with them, specifically on what we call bottoms-up kind of Grassroots AI innovation. So what we're seeing is a lot of companies are placing their kind of typical ways of looking at digital transformation, top-down AI bets, but we believe there's a lot of value to be unlocked bottoms up, and that value proposition is resonating very well in the third quarter.

Specifically, we've also had some -- we had a really big breakthrough in the third quarter, which is going to have implications on our talent and organizational model moving forward. I mentioned to you in the last couple of quarters that our global simulation team had been experimenting with different AI tools. And we started to go live with our clients in the third quarter. That continued to rapidly expand around the world. And just actually in the last couple of weeks, we kind of hit the -- I don't know if it's the final breakthrough, but it's a big breakthrough across our most complex simulation platform.

So we have officially completely redesigned or retrofitted how we build simulations across our practices. And this has strategic implications for how many people we have in our operations teams, how many people we're going to put on the client project teams, the economics for our clients. I announced this breakthrough to 90 of our existing [Technical Difficulty]in BTS North America, and they were absolutely thrilled to hear about the values for them.

And so we're now moving from, I would call it, breakthrough AI value experimentation and innovation to scaling this new way of working globally. And we will start to see material P&L gains already in the first quarter. From an automation update, part of the reason why we made the Sounding Board acquisition in the first quarter was they have great tech platform, which would allow us to scale. So our movement of existing workloads over to their platform is on track.

And we are continuing to do that through the first quarter. So additional savings in OpEx will be coming beginning in the second quarter of 2026. So for those of you who have been with us for a long time, you're very used to seeing the slide that we are used to average growth of 12% CAGR since 2001 and an average profit growth of 15% per year. It has been a tough year, specifically for one reason, that's BTS North America's core business, which is why we did the leadership change in early June, and that turnaround is on plan and progressing well.

It's going to get a little tougher before we get back to the growth, but the plan is in the first half of the year, it's looking good. So given although we see clear signs of the operational improvements, and we have strong markets in Europe and most of the world, we do foresee revenue decline in BTS North America in the fourth quarter. So that fourth quarter dip, combined with continued currency headwinds is the 2 major reasons behind why we are lowering our outlook to be significantly worse than what we said previously. And with that, I'm sure there's clarifying questions and comments. So I'm all yours.

Excellent. Wonderful, Jessica. I have a couple of questions in the beginning here, but I also tell the other analysts who have joined, just raise your hand, and I'll let you ask questions to Jessica as well, of course. First, a question on Europe here, somewhat softer demand into Q4 despite the strong year so far. Is there any particular market or sector behind the slowing trend in the fall or more the customer pipeline you are sitting on?

There's not a particular sector behind it, and it's not a particular office. Our London team's pipeline is a little bit softer than the others. But no, it's more that they had a really strong first half. And when we look at their full year performance, it's still going to be really good with great margins and growth and all of that. And to also kind of balance the softening in the fourth quarter, we do not believe that, that's going to carry over into 2026.

The pipeline and the deals and the work that we have line of sight on already in the first quarter shows strong growth. So it's more like a softer end to a really big year for Europe.

Okay. That's clear. And then on the U.S. market, some positive words on the U.S. tech sector here in the report. We can all follow the huge AI investments, of course. Is this what partly drives demand for you as well that the tech sector in general is more willing to do investments? Or are there any other drivers behind this comment?

No, it's a mixed [bag] with tech. We can already start to see kind of the new hyperscalers compared to the older tech who are still trying to compete for the growth rates that they've been used to. So in some cases, for example, we have one of our larger software clients who has just gone through a major reorg. And with that, we expect their spend with us in the fourth quarter to be down quite a lot. At the same time, we've just brought in new software tech clients that are more on the hyperscale side, and we expect that to ramp really quickly. So it's a mixed bag.

I see. I see. In general, in the market, do you see any noticeable price pressure or price competition in some markets for like general management consulting services today?

Not really. I mean not so significantly. There is less interest in paying for content license which for us has never been a very big part of our business, but it's something that is affecting the training industry as a whole and any competitors who mainly have a content-first play. Our pricing compared to traditional consulting firms, especially on the AI implementation side is very affordable.

So we are not seeing any pricing pressure there. We are not seeing pricing pressure on our new AI platforms and technology. One of the breakthroughs with all of the simulation redesign work we've been doing is we'll be able to build simulations faster. And so I do think we're going to see a shift in our client revenue perhaps less upfront because we can do it more quickly, but faster to deploy, right? And with the faster deploy, we will see the license and usage fees hitting quicker than normal.

Yes, I see. That's clear. And then a clarifying question here on the guidance for 2025. You also include that revenue will decline as well as EBITDA. Is it also significantly worse on revenue? Or how should we think about that addition?

So no, we made a mistake and then we've already fixed it, and we'll be sending it. We were only relating to the earnings. It was a miss type. So top line for the full year, we still expect actually growth at the group level, just low single-digits growth. And yes, that was our mistake. So I'm sorry about that.

No problem. That's very clear. Let's see if any of the other analysts would like to ask a question, we'll see how the format works here if they can raise their hand or just unmute. Let's see if Oscar or Johan, for example. Otherwise, we have a few from the chat. I'll take one for the chat, just try to shout out any of the other analysts. They seem to be joined correctly here at least.

But we have a couple of questions from the chat Jessica. And then the first one on license sales. Can you elaborate on the dynamics within license sales? Is it related to smaller deal size or fewer deals in total as well? Do you think that you are losing some deals to competitors and why? And you also say that the lower license sales in Q3 was only temporary. Can you elaborate on that?

Yes. The particular license deal that was extra painful to us that was sold through the channel, that was really just to one customer, and it was for one of our standard training simulations [Audio Gap] before is still relevant in terms of clients not wanting to pay content license. So if we have any old content license deals out there, we don't have much, but those would be at risk. Now the growth of the Verity platform, the BTS simulation usage, some of our other AI platform offerings, that growth, that subscription growth will outweigh any decline in content license or product license revenue. But in Q3, it was just that one simple product through one customer.

I see. That's clear. On one-offs, are there any one-offs in this quarter in Q3? And yes, what was the underlying EBITDA in that case? I think that you had like SEK 5 million in Q1 and SEK 14 million in Q2, if I remind correctly here, anything in Q3?

Probably just a tiny little bit of extra severance, but not much.

No, exactly. You don't state anything in the report. And on the cost savings program, what's the status of this cost savings program? How much of the cost savings were realized in Q3?

Nearly all of them. Yes. So we'll get 100% live on them in Q4, but the majority were realized in North America in the third quarter. What's interesting is what we're going to do for this next phase now that we've had the final breakthrough in using new technology across all of our simulations. And we are very busy right now working through those implications.

So -- but it really -- we just hit the next level of breakthrough just a week ago, and the teams are moving fast. But this will have implications across consultant teams, our digital enablement teams, operations, project managers. So I can't -- I don't have enough clarity right now to share with all of you what to expect, but we are working on it very quickly.

I see. A linked question to that, in terms of number of employees going into 2026, do you expect this number to grow in '26? Or should we see top line growth coming from increased sales per employee rather?

Yes. We will bring in a few people here or there, probably revenue generators, but the total number of BTS employees will shrink in 2026. So we will have revenue per employee improvement, not just from what we've already done this year, but from a second wave as well.

Okay. That's clear. And then also a question here. In Q4 '24, you mentioned that 2 large clients canceled their annual events, which affected revenues by negatively $2 million. Are those clients back with their annual events in Q4 '25 now?

No. They're not back. And one of them is also most likely going to be behind another major drop in the fourth quarter. So we're working on it right now. But yes, yes, that's -- one of them is why North America is going to have a tough time in the fourth quarter. That said, I can give a little more context. That's one of the tech companies that's gone through a major reorg, and have really changed their budgeting approaches, and they're not doing another big event in the first quarter this year.

The number of large company sales kickoffs and events that we are doing, however, is up across North America, but the average revenue spend is down. So the team is really busy. The deal sizes are slightly smaller than they were last year. And that's -- I think that's just a reflection of clients want to do something still, but they're spending less.

I see. A couple of written questions here from Johan Sunden. When during Q3 did the important licensing deal in North America fell away? And what is the risk that more important clients do the same going forward?

Yes. The third quarter, we found out about it in the last few weeks of the third quarter. We don't have that many other product license deals like that in the system. We have -- we don't have risk of that happening again in the fourth quarter. So I mean, yes, it's not something that's so frequent across our revenue base.

And it's also the delta from Q3 last year with APG that made it particularly painful. Yes. So I don't see it as a particularly acute problem compared to the other things we're trying to do to get back to growth.

I see. I see. And then a second question from Johan here. How was sales and marketing costs in Q3 isolated to the other markets business? I guess the question is how large share of sales and marketing are related to other markets roughly?

From a total sales and marketing spend?

I guess so.

Maybe I can clarify. More like how isolated the step-up in sales and marketing cost is for Q3 and if there will be a similar kind of step-up in Q4 and...

Yes, yes. No, isolated to Q3.

Perfect. But you said that there was some [dealers] now in Q4 as well, right?

The Q3 is where most of the world did their increase in marketing events. I've been busy in North America in Q4 doing the dinners, but the expenses in most of the world that we're referring to was in the third quarter.

Yes. Perfect. Yes, my final question is more like the AI breakthrough that you highlighted just during the presentation. Just curious to hear your some initial thoughts on kind of impact on unit economics. How has kind of feedback been from clients? Any worries that there will be fee pressures? And just curious to understand how the value created will be distributed.

I'll share with you exactly as I can see it at this moment. And it's wild how fast things are changing. And you all know this and you hear it probably from all your clients. But I just to give you a sense, like, I've been waiting for the team to figure out if we can do this across our biggest [SIMs]. And I got a phone call last week saying that Microsoft just released some new feature. And that feature is kind of the final missing piece, but no one could have dreamed that, that feature would have come out a week ago, right? It's just kind of the world we're living in right now. Client feedback is coming in 3 different ways. One is we're able to demo in our sales meetings a real [SIM], what we mean, a simulation of their business.

And that demo is blowing their minds. Like they cannot believe that we're able to kind of visualize what they're expressing in their strategy in such a quick way. So it is helping us move deals forward faster and have really high win rates. So that's a good sign. Fee pressure has not hit us yet, and we are working through our -- updating our pricing guidelines around use cases because what I shared with 90 of our customers and many of them who have known us well, we're nodding the whole time.

Yes, we can build these a lot faster and still have high fidelity. But for some instances, they'll choose not to do it faster because sometimes we get paid just to have the working sessions with their executive teams and align everybody through the process of modeling and simulating. Other times, the whole point is to get a simulation on as fast as possible. So when speed is of the essence, yes, the upfront build will be reduced. if it's a small simulation, just -- I mean, it might be reduced from SEK 100,000 to SEK 50,000 or something like that to build it. But the benefit for us is that we'll go straight into licensing. And usually, what clients have always wanted to do is get more usage out of it as opposed to have some of their budget going towards the upfront build.

So we will reduce some of the upfront fees, but I don't -- it hasn't happened yet, and we'll see kind of deal-by-deal, but how we shift that. On the other hand, getting the subscription and the usage and prioritizing that over the customization, I think, is better economics for the firm and allows us to deliver more value faster. Look, from an internal perspective, there's 2 major changes.

Before this, when we would build the simulations, we would basically first model it in excel with some other software, and then we would move it back and forth between the Mumbai team and they would build a different version of it or an updated skin or something would go back and forth. That whole step is gone. So now the team is just coding or vibe coding and do stuff right in front of the client together with the client.

There is no need to go back and forth with other teams. We'll go from 7-person team to 2-person teams in terms of the design. So it's a pretty big implication.

Good. We have a few written questions from Oscar Ronnkvist, SEB as well. First one, did any of the pushed out revenues in Q2 become realized in Q3 in North America?

It's interesting, yes. And the win rates are growing, and we're celebrating all of those as well. So it hasn't been a -- Q3 in North America did not feel like, oh, thank goodness, all that stuff materialized from Q2. It's been a balanced feeling of the work that got pushed plus the new client and logos that have been coming in. So I don't have the exact percentage of revenue in the third quarter that was from the push. I can get back to you if you'd like.

Fair enough. The other question, I think it's related to Johan's question first on increased investments in other markets in the quarter and how temporary they are. But Oscar's question here is, can we assume an increased margin ahead in other markets because of lower investments?

Yes. Yes. Yes, you should in the fourth quarter, both better margins and revenue growth.

Yes. Okay. Fair. And then we have another question from the chat as well. License sales were down last year in Q4, 33% year-over-year. So you should meet quite low comps this year in Q4. Do you think license sales will be lower year-over-year again here in Q4? Or could they recover a bit?

There's one deal that we've been doing every year in the fourth quarter that I do not think we are going to do again. And that deal is about $3 million in revenue. And it's not that we're losing the client. It's just that they cannot make the economics work right now given the cost pressures that they're under. So we're going to evolve from that way of working with them to scoping each individual project now for time and materials and subscription and all of that individually.

So yes, if you think about that, even though that's a different partnering model, if you think of that as license, you're going to see one more drop in the fourth quarter from that particular client.

Okay. That's very clear. I'm trying to scroll through the chat here. I don't think there are any further questions actually, and we got questions from all analysts, I could see join the call and some of the audience. So thank you very much, Jessica, for the presentation, and have a good night sleep, and we will talk later today, Swedish time and tomorrow for you.

Super. Thank you.

Thank you very much all for joining.

Bye-bye.